State’s Auto Emissions Bill Is Just So Much Gas

It’s easy to be a “leader” when others have to pay the price. The latest manifestation of such cheap posturing is the current effort in the California Legislature to regulate “greenhouse gas” (that is, carbon dioxide) emissions from autos.

Last week, the Senate amended AB 1058, which puts new restrictions on tailpipe emissions of cars and light trucks. The bill is being debated in the Assembly; a vote is imminent and is expected to be close.

Let us review what the atmospheric scientists actually know. Over the past century, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have increased from about 280 parts per million to about 360ppm. Earth surface temperatures are about 1 degree Fahrenheit higher than was the case 100 years ago.

Most of the temperature increase took place before 1940, while most of the carbon dioxide emissions came after that, a sequence of events that presents a problem for the global warming hypothesis.

Carbon dioxide is a very small component of so-called greenhouse gases, most of which are water vapor and clouds.

No one seriously claims to know whether the past warming was caused by human activities; whether further warming will occur and, if it does, whether it will result from human activities, and whether such warming in some general sense would be a bad thing.

What we do know is the dirty little secret of the environmental leftists: A full implementation of the Kyoto treaty would delay global warming over the next century by at most six years.

As former Greenpeace activist Bjorn Lomborg shows in his 2001 book “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” the annual economic cost of the Kyoto treaty would be about $200billion, the same as the estimated one-time cost of providing clean drinking water and sanitation for every living person.

Back to Sacramento: The current legislative effort, by many of the same people who brought us the electricity mess, would require the use of expensive technologies for automobiles, raising prices by thousands of dollars and/or forcing sharp downsizing of cars, yielding hundreds of additional crash deaths and injuries each year, according to the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences.

And for what? California gasoline consumption is about 5% of world consumption. Suppose that the legislation reduces California gasoline consumption by an impossible 20%. World consumption would be reduced by 1%, and any reduction in greenhouse gas emissions--let alone actual atmospheric concentrations--would be unmeasurable, particularly because automotive emissions are a relatively minor source of greenhouse gases. Moreover, the increased prices of automobiles and reduced safety for motorists would provide incentives to keep older vehicles longer, reducing or reversing the already infinitesimal benefits to the environment.

In any event, proponents have not asserted any such concrete benefits. Instead, vague claims about reduced global warming have been combined with the argument that “California must be a leader.”

Whatever that means, it is a slogan, not a policy.

Feel-goodism and moral preening are poor bases for legislation, particularly when the politicians pursuing them are unlikely to be present years from now when the adverse effects are felt by ordinary people.

Moreover, the state Air Resources Board, charged under this proposed legislation with developing regulations, is responsible for one of the great environmental regulatory fiascoes of recent years: the 1990 decree that by 2003 10% of all cars sold in California were to have been “zero emission vehicles,” that is, electric cars.

Twelve years and millions of taxpayer dollars later, that program has been modified into insignificance.

If the environmental leftists really cared about greenhouse gas emissions, they would support nuclear power generation, which is indisputably clean and has a strong safety record in the West. Will they?

Don’t bet on it.

A footnote:

Did you know that legislators in Sacramento are allowed to choose autos that the state purchases for them for their official activities? The Associated Press reports that almost half have chosen low-gas-mileage sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks, and most of the rest picked sedans with lower than average fuel efficiency.

Can they spell hypocrisy?